Australian jailed in China on murky charges

Philip Wen and Sanghee Liu

Australian businesswoman Charlotte Chou has been sentenced to eight years in a Chinese jail for embezzlement and other corporate charges relating to the private university she helped found in Guangzhou.

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Supporters of Chou, including her family and former business partner Lin Yongping, say minority shareholder Zhu Hanbang had paid Guangzhou authorities to keep Chou in jail, in order to wrest control of the profitable university she established.

"I'm coming to understand that fairness and justice will not come my way. All I want is a quick decision," Chou said in her previous appearance court in April.

"But I will never admit I committed a crime, till my death."

Chou, a single mother, was first arrested by Guangzhou police in June 2008, while her then one-year-old boy, Lincoln, was asleep. She has not seen her son, who now lives with his grandmother, since.

She served 18 months in jail on bribery convictions, before being released.

She was immediately rearrested at the prison gate on fresh charges of embezzling millions of yuan from the South China Institute of Software Engineering.

She has maintained that the money was merely repayments of a properly documented loan.

The case bears close similarities to a separate case involving Matthew Ng, another successful Australian businessperson who fell foul of the Guangdong judicial system.

In March, Ng was sentenced to 11.5 years in jail after losing his appeal against bribery and other corporate charges involving his successful travel business, Et-China.

His lawyers have maintained the criminal case was orchestrated by a third party in an attempt to obtain the profitable Guangzhou business cheaply, after Ng rejected a buyout offer from his joint venture partner, a company owned by the Guangzhou municipal government.